Feds' focus is turning to apps

Federal agencies racing to embrace tablets and a new generation of smartphones are facing a new challenge: There’s no government app for that.

Not yet, at least.

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As more federal workers swap their government-issued BlackBerrys and laptops for a new crop of mobile devices, the focus is quickly turning to applications.

Enterprise government apps are currently limited in scope and quantity, but agencies are increasingly looking to their own programmers or contracting third-party developers to build apps.

“There’s going to be a million different government apps,” said Tom Suder, president and CEO of Mobile Government Solutions, a private-sector firm that developed a mobile app for the Federal Registry. “But we’re not quite there yet.”

That means agencies are putting in place the initial building blocks to set up internal app stores. It’s something along the lines of a hybrid Apple/Android app store that gives federal workers a one-stop shop for all their agency-specific app needs.

The federal enterprise app stores in most cases are still far from reality. Before federal workers start downloading their agency’s latest app, government IT officials must answer complex cybersecurity, procurement and policy questions.

But the potential range of apps that can be tailored for agencies is nearly limitless.

With the right app, Department of Agriculture food inspectors can replace clipboards and laptops with tablets capable of recording and processing complex safety data. And a cache of yet-to-be-developed medical apps are expected to transform the health care landscape at government hospitals across the country.

Or how about an app for taps? Or one that shows military recruits how to do a proper push-up?

Those are both possibilities in an Army app enterprise store of the future, said Lt. Col. Matt Dosmann, one of the Army’s mobility gurus.

The military branch is currently involved in one of the larger federal pilot programs testing a range of mobile devices — from Research In Motion’s PlayBook tablet to the iPhone. Army officials are looking to develop apps that can do everything from triggering drone missiles to providing new recruits a digital training schedule.

“We’re looking at the whole range of applications,” said Dosmann, who oversees mobile device pilot-testing for the Army’s cybersecurity division. “But we haven’t gotten to the point where we’re allowing them to download anything yet.”

The Army is gearing up to launch its own apps store called the Army Marketplace.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, Chief Information Officer Roger Baker envisions an ecosystem of medical apps that will transform patient care at VA hospitals. The VA is currently testing several hundred iPads on its network and expects that number to creep up to 1,000 soon and balloon to 100,000 in the next 18 months.

VA programmers are already busy writing applications for the agency, but the bulk of the medical apps the agency will use have yet to be developed, Baker said.

“The great thing about these devices is whatever imagination I have about what can be done, our clinicians and folks around the country have a thousand to a million more times more imagination about it,” Baker told reporters during a conference call last week. “That’s the real power of these things.”